Musicians rely on their fans to keep their careers running, but sometimes the attention can be too much. Sometimes, it even crosses the line into being dangerous. Overly enthusiastic crowds, people storming the stage, and even fans following bands home are all horror stories for musicians. Here are four musicians who have had frightening experiences with fans.
The Beatles
The Beatles dealt with such intensely dedicated fans that the media had to coin the phrase Beatlemania. Fans broke into their houses, jumped on the roofs of cars while they were inside, and attacked their wives if they saw them on the street. While some members of the band were more receptive to this behavior than others, George Harrison found it frightening.
“Every time we went to Texas, we nearly got wiped out,” he told Rolling Stone in 1987. “The first time just by the police not listening to our advance man tell them how to handle the situation. We landed on the runway in Houston; they put about four police at the airport, and so there were thousands of kids. They were actually running along the runway, and the pilot just turned the engines off and let the plane coast to a stop. Within a few minutes, they were all over the plane. They were on the outside of the plane, knocking on the windows and all over the wings. It was ridiculous.”
He didn’t appreciate the “scrapes and near misses” the band kept having and was relieved when they stopped touring in 1966.
Tom Petty
While Tom Petty’s fans were not nearly as exuberant as The Beatles’, he once had a frightening experience while performing. During a concert, fans pulled Petty offstage, and he worried they were going to kill him.
“I honestly thought I was dead,” Petty told Playboy in 1982, adding, “I know they loved me, but they were trying to kill me. I watched a video tape of the whole thing later, and though it didn’t take so long on tape, I thought I was down there for an eternity.”
He couldn’t free himself from the crowd on his own, so his longtime roadie Bugs Weidel tried to pull him out.
“My roadie, Bugs, dived in — ‘crowd swimming,’ he calls it,” Petty explained. “I could see him about five layers of people away. Our eyes met for a moment, and he gave me an ‘I don’t know if I can get you’ look.”
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Luckily, Petty escaped unscathed, but the experience shook him.
Stevie Nicks
Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks has not had the same experience as Petty, but she worries about it. She explained that she wears her iconic platform boots is to protect herself against overly enthusiastic fans.
“A few times I’ve said, ‘Let go of my hand,’ and some people don’t,” she told Variety. “And my foot starts to raise, and they get it, like, ‘I don’t want to be kicked with that boot. So I better back off.’ So they have their moments where I feel like they’re a weapon.”
She hasn’t had to kick anyone, but she has had a few heart-pounding moments where she has considered it.
“Sometimes your fans just get out of control, and they’re so happy and so excited that they grab your hand — and you’re at a bad angle when you’re bending over to shake hands,” she said. “They could just pull you off, and it would be really easy to do. So that’s the point where you have to look at them like, ‘Don’t even think about it.’ My fans are great, but every once in a while, I’m happy to have my boots on.”
Frank Zappa
Some of the more terrifying fan encounters have happened to Frank Zappa while he was onstage. In 1971, a fan fired a flare gun during a concert and started a fire. At a show days later, a fan rushed onstage and pushed Zappa off as he was singing The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” He fell into the concrete orchestra pit below.
“The band thought I was dead,” Zappa wrote in his autobiography The Real Frank Zappa Book (via Ultimate Classic Rock). “My head was over on my shoulder, and my neck was bent like it was broken. I had a gash in my chin, a hole in the back of my head, a broken rib, and a fractured leg. One arm was paralyzed.”
The attack was so severe that Zappa canceled the remainder of his tour and was in a wheelchair for almost a year.
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